In
the course of one night, an army boy loses his virginity;
a teenage girl gets initiated into the pleasure manufacturing
process; and a jaded prostitute pays a young busker good money
in exchange for a song he never gets to sing… Movie Review:

Ekachai Uekrongtham converses in Tsai Ming-liang’s pensive
language of melancholia, and unimpressively disintegrates
into a laborious simulacrum of aimless pomposity. Made in
Singapore’s most prominent and indiscreet red-light
district, “Pleasure Factory” aims to upset our
expectations, with the film’s clunky title telling all.
It takes our country’s most fertile source of iniquity
and penitential slaughterhouse of post-coital repasts, and
then picks away at it with alarming anaemia.

While
a stoic stud paces outside the door of an adolescent damsel
and an amorous john, a flustered cadet is canvassed by a troop
of whores in a darkened alleyway; elsewhere a leggy strumpet
uniformly bounces in a convertible as a furled salivating
sluggard occupies her. It all smells like societal entropy.
Uekrongtham’s postured film techniques evocates the
malaise of afflicted individuals over a single night’s
sojourn, in the bustling den of ephemeral pleasures called
Geylang, cloistered by (as his camera frequently pans up to)
the country’s well-behaved suburbia. Uekrongtham is
eager to provide the reflections of this subsection for other
capers as well by intertexting the film’s prose with
unneeded mockumentary inserts that only serves to sully the
enigma surrounding its patrons and curdling its attempted
lyricism.

Sleaze
is poignant in “Pleasure Factory”, its camera
sensualises the commodity of flesh by leering and lingering
over its nudity – a surprisingly fair amount of equal
opportunity bareness. Indecision may or may not be its characters’
problem as the film emphasises the streaks of unhappiness
and contentment its dwellers feel, the surging romanticism
of loneliness abated coupled with the revulsion of banal commerce.
There's a smidgen of directorial scopophilic pleasure derived
here when lecherous old men are violent sadists, as the camera
turns quickly away to leave us at the mercy of their repulsive
grunts, but lovingly caresses the glistening skin of its younger
clientele and comparatively more willing ladies of the evening.

Uekrongtham’s
refusal of order and sense is extended not only to his story’s
flow but to his camera as well. It shoves up close to its
characters, with a lack of spatial awareness in the film that
seems to have been mistaken for heightened intimacy that ends
up being claustrophobic. However, it is consistent in its
hysterics and over-wrought touches of melodrama that remain
spineless in its obstinate elliptical narrative strands that
tenuously crisscross, especially the evidently butchered gay
subplot that would have probably served the film better completely
excised.

The
urban cages of Geylang deserve its long overdue representation
but the message is hazy in Uekrongtham’s film. It’s
not as transgressive as it supposes, mostly because it’s
so declaratively derivative and detached in its artifice that,
unlike its obvious influence, it can never truly express the
disenchantment and desperation of its denizens.